Farewell to a smooth messenger

Social critic Gil Scott-Heron has finally gone mainstream. The smooth-rapping, mellow-sounding messenger of the cold, hard truth has finally been let out of the bag – sort of.

Unfortunately, as is too often the case, Scott-Heron had to be laid to rest to get his due accolades.

After Scott-Heron, 62, died on Friday upon returning from a European tour and becoming ill, his obituary made the pages of nearly every major American newspaper.

The Chicago Tribune said: "Public Enemy's Chuck D once said hip-hop was black America's CNN. If so, Gil Scott-Heron was the network's first great anchorman, presaging hip-hop and infusing soul and jazz with poetry, humor and pointed political commentary."

An account from The Associated Press said Scott-Heron articulated "the rage and the disillusionment of the black masses through song and spoken word."

Some people called him the Godfather of hip-hop, but Scott-Heron rejected that title, seeing himself more as a jazz and blues man — and a poet.

He influenced a range of great voices — from Ivy League scholar Cornel West to hip-hop legends Chuck D, Kanye West and Tupac Shakur and may other modern-day rappers who sampled his music.

Yet the revolution still has not been televised.

Television, both local and national, has not been as vocal in telling the Scott-Heron story, one not so easily boiled down to a 30-second news blip.

Media watcher Richard Prince said in his "Journal-isms" column that BBC-made documentary of Scott-Heron's life has yet to be shown on U.S. television.

TV-One, BET, OWN network — where are you?

Scott-Heron never made "60 Minutes" or "Nightline." And as for "Oprah," oh, please. He definitely didn't fit in Winfrey's demographic.

Perhaps the most honest witness to the execution of true American values, Scott-Heron — and his story — has been ignored by both the big networks and even cable TV execs who are often willing to tackle tough subjects.

All he did was to offer — to dynamic rhythms and beats — some of the most precise and biting criticism of class-ism, racism, hypocrisy, hopelessness and ignorance that the world has ever seen.

And without pause he attacked beloved leaders, from Ronald Reagan on down.

Not a sound-bite king, Scott-Heron was more prone to powerful rants. His "B Movie," which mocked Reagan's 1980 election, has endured.

In that piece, he insinuated that the former B-movie actor would fake his way through the White House the way he faked his way through Hollywood. And he questioned the "mandate" under which Reagan was elected, citing that just 26 percent of the nation's registered voters made up a majority of people at the polls that year.

And then there was the eternal, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" in 1970 in which Scott-Heron said:

You will not be able to stay home, brother.

You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.

You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,

Skip out for beer during commercials,

Because the revolution will not be televised.

The world was not ready for Scott-Heron then — or now.

Ours is a world where fake-ism is a much more powerful menace than race-ism ever was.

It's a world so void of people speaking real truth that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder remarked at a recent appearance that HBO should bring back the critically acclaimed series, "The Wire."

That series featured Newport News natives Sonja Sohn and Frankie Faison, whose Bad Newz grit added to the realism – from baby mama drama to the drug-thug culture. That was the world of Gil Scott-Heron, who himself succumbed to drug addiction, taking him away from the studio in the 1990s.

His long absence affected Scott-Heron's legacy, says Hampton University media professor Wayne Dawkins, a huge fan who still has vinyl Scott-Heron albums.

"I think when he kind of disappeared for a while, people who should know better, forgot about him," said Dawkins, who called Scott-Heron "a newspaper columnist whose columns were his music."

Such a shame that Scott-Heron never got to sit on Oprah's couch. What a world that would forget about such a great voice.